In the 1980s and '90s, people across the world started sending and receiving their very first emails.
This included former U.S. President Bill Clinton. According to one claim (archived) circulating online, a photo showed the 42nd U.S. President sending the first ever presidential email in 1993.
The X account that shared the photo wrote, "President Clinton composing the first presidential email, 1993."
The photo and claim also circulated on Facebook (archived) and Reddit (archived).
The photo was authentic, meaning not generated by artificial intelligence. According to the reputable photo agency Getty Images, the photo actually showed Clinton writing an email to astronaut John Glenn aboard the space shuttle Discovery in November 1998 — five years after the date online posts said.
The Clinton Presidential Library held another photo that showed Clinton writing to Glenn that it also said was from November 1998.
Given the above, it appeared the photos circulating online were from 1998, not 1993. However, as we lay out below, it remains unclear whether they showed Clinton's first presidential email. Therefore, we leave this claim unrated.
The 1998 message
According to official sources and Clinton himself, the former president did send his first email in 1998.
Clinton posted (archived) on X (then Twitter) in 2014 that the 1998 photo showed him writing his "first (ever!) email" to Glenn. Three years earlier, in 2011, Clinton reportedly said during a talk at the Ford Foundation in New York that the email to Glenn was one of two he sent while president — the other being a message to U.S. troops in the Adriatic.
The Clinton Presidential Library (archived) and Clinton Presidential Center (archived) also both said on social media that Clinton's first email was the message to Glenn in 1998.
According to the Clinton White House's website, Clinton had a public email address since 1993 and was the first president to have one.
We contacted the Clinton Presidential Library and Presidential Center to ask why Clinton appeared to have had an email address that he allegedly never used for five years and await a reply.
WH tech director said Clinton first emailed himself
A transcript of an interview with Dr. John Gibbons, Clinton's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, cast doubt on claims that Clinton wrote his first email to Glenn in November 1998.
Gibbons served in the White House from Clinton's inauguration in 1993 to April 1998 — six months before the picture of Clinton writing to Glen was taken.
According to that interview transcript, Gibbons presided over Clinton's first email, which was to himself. Gibbons reportedly said:
We wanted to introduce the President to email and the Net. So we brought him over to the old EOB, and he sat down in front of this computer—it may have been the first time he sat down in front of a computer—and showed him how email worked and gave him his email address over across the street in the Oval Office. So he typed in his first email message. It was something like, Bill Clinton, it's time to come home for lunch. Signed, Hillary, something like that. I saved a copy of it. That was his first email.
Gibbons did not say in the interview when Clinton sent this alleged email but given Gibbons' time in the White House, Clinton would have written the reported email before November 1998.
Gibbons died in 2015. His daughter told Snopes via email that the family donated most of her father's documents to the National Archives. That collection did not contain the alleged email, and Snopes could not independently verify its existence.
Of all (or both) the emails Clinton sent, the one depicted in the 1998 photo is perhaps the most famous. The Toshiba brand computer that Clinton used, which still had copies of Glenn's message and Clinton's reply on its hard drive, sold at auction in 2014 for $61,931.
Bill Clinton is not the only Clinton to face doubts about how he managed his emails. Snopes has previously reported on Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton, and the FBI's two investigations into her email practices while secretary of state.